Walter H. Thompson was Churchill's bodyguard from 1921 until 1945, brought back from retirement at the outbreak of war.

Tom Hickman's authorised biography draws heavily on extracts from a manuscript recently discovered by his great-niece, in which Thompson gives a unique insider's account of a number of occasions on which Churchill's life was put seriously at risk and his intervention was needed.

After the war, Thompson married one of Churchill's secretaries, and her recollections, as well as those of surviving family members, are interwoven to tell the revelatory inside story of life beside the Greatest Briton.